Batman: Arkham Knight sales suspended on PC

Following massive backlash from the PC gaming community, Warner Bros has removed Batman: Arkham Knight from Steam and all other sales platforms, while it works on fixing the major performance issues.

Launched earlier this week, Batman: Arkham Knight was the fourth game in the series and Rocksteady Studios’ final contribution to the Batman series. It received good reviews pre-PC disaster, hinting that most reviewers received console copies of the game.

The issues on PC are numerous, including framerate caps to 30fps, multiple performance related issues and problems with gameplay coming from the lack of optimisation. High-end gamers who own GTX 980s were reporting performance issues, meaning it is a system wide issue.

In screenshots showing PS4 to PC gameplay and cutscenes, it appears the game has been downgraded. This is rather remarkable given the PC taking the screenshots has much more power than a PS4 or Xbox One.

Warner Bros were originally defensive of the criticism, claiming it would not update the frames per second to support solid 60fps. In a statement released earlier today, the publisher appeared more supportive of PC gamers and even went as far as to show ways to obtain a refund from Steam or other virtual stores.

Pulling games from the Steam store in the first week is unprecedented, at least for a triple-A title. Warner Bros is working with Rocksteady and a third-party developer responsible for the PC port, to make sure all performance issues are sorted.

Information on the amount of refunds has not been reported, but some PC customers believe Warner Bros took the game off the Steam platform to prevent any further refund issues. Steam is obliged to honour all refund requests, if the player has under two hours played of the game and owned it for less than 48 hours.

Warner Bros gave no date for re-launch on PC, meaning Batman: Arkham Knight players might be waiting a while for that saviour patch.